His formal education over, Swift’s real education in the world of politics and literature began.
Swift left Trinity and Ireland early in 1689. He gave as his reason ‘the Troubles then breaking out’,5 and this is endorsed by Sir William Temple, who claimed that Swift ‘was forced away by the desertion of that College upon the calamities of the country’.6 On its own the move from Ireland would have been of little value, taking him from immediate danger into what was only comparative safely in England. There has never been an adequate explanation of the circumstances under which, after time spent with his mother, near Leicester, he joined the household of Sir William Temple (1628–99), at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. The explanation generally given derives from Swift’s supposed assertion, as reported by his cousin Deane Swift, that his mother advised her son to go to Temple:
I really cannot tell you in your present circumstances what advice to give you, but suppose you would apply yourself to Sir WILLIAM TEMPLE, who is both a great and a wise man? I cannot but think he would at least give you some directions, and perhaps, if he were acquainted with your uncomfortable situation, recommend you to some kind of employment either in church or state. His lady you know is a relation of ours, and besides his father, Sir JOHN TEMPLE had a regard and friendship for your father and for your uncles until his last hour. Go your ways in the name of GOD to Sir WILLIAM TEMPLE, and upon asking his advice you will immediately perceive what encouragement or preferment you are likely to expect from his friendship.7
This was the single most important event in his life, and Sir William Temple himself the single greatest influence over him. Temple endowed and trained Swift as both a man and a writer, giving him a wealth of intellectual, moral and social understanding. Temple himself was a notable example of moral purpose in an age when this seemed to be in a state of disintegration in the face of intellectual inquiry. His achievements as a statesman and diplomat had been substantial. His output as a writer, in which Swift in time was to play a part, was already impressive. And there was the added appeal that Temple had withdrawn from the world he had served and was living, like a retired consul or senator of classical times, in a fine house surrounded by gardens and parklands, setting his life in order. His greatness has excited extreme views. At times even Swift himself appears to have had mixed feelings, and to have exercised discretion about revealing them.
Swift became many things in the Moor Park household: amanuensis, editor, confidential assistant and agent for Temple, and, on one occasion, messenger to King William III. He also became tutor to the younger daughter of a servant in the household, Esther Johnson, later called ‘Stella’ by Swift. Ultimately, Temple made Swift his literary executor, as well as her guardian. During Stella’s lifetime there was speculation about her parentage; it was presumed that she was Sir William Temple’s own child. Much later the possibility that she was the child of his younger sibling, Henry, was put forward.
We know a good deal about this period in Swift’s life. We have, first of all, an important statement by him dealing with his arrival at Moor Park, the ‘Ode to the Honble Sir William Temple’.8 At the outset of Swift’s time at Moor Park it seems that Temple was at his other house at Sheen, so that we find this young graduate, fresh from Ireland, sitting in the great man’s home while the great man is away somewhere else, and penning an elaborate ode in the Cowley manner. Its main emphasis is on a prospective future life as a Poet, but it is crafted around the admiration Swift felt for the quality of virtue he recognized in Temple. Stanza by stanza the confessed inadequacies of the author of the Ode are contrasted with the real merits and achievements of the great man who is being addressed.
What is uniquely important about the Ode is the fact that it is almost certainly a contemporary account. It may never have been seen by Temple, though as a poet himself of modest achievement he would probably have been understanding and sympathetic. It is also the earliest surviving account of himself by Swift. Its 1689 date has been disputed; yet it is difficult to imagine Swift writing such a piece later on in their relationship.
The first stay in Moor Park was brief, lasting just over a year, and from it we have no other writing by Swift. He was sent by Temple back to Ireland in May 1690, carrying with him a letter from his patron to the King’s Secretary of State, Robert Southwell. Southwell had served as a diplomat in Portugal and had corresponded with Temple. He was Irish, from a Kinsale landowning family, and had succeeded his father as vice-admiral of Munster in the year of Swift’s birth. He was also a close friend of the Duke of Ormonde, and was related by marriage to Sir William Petty.
The event that took Swift back to Ireland was to be the culmination of a growing crisis: the Jacobite threat to the Glorious Revolution. King William III was engaged on a campaign the outcome of which would seriously affect the balance of power between Catholic and Protestant Europe. Sir William Temple, who had spent much of his diplomatic career engaged in the detailed pursuit of the Protestant and Restoration interests of England in Holland, and moreover was well informed about affairs in Ireland, was supremely aware of the nature of the threat. Southwell, also previously a diplomat, was well acquainted with Temple. Elrington Ball says that Southwell was ‘considered by his contemporaries, especially by the great Duke of Ormonde, a man of singular discernment, prudence and ability’.9 Ball also refers to Southwell’s considerable knowledge of Ireland, which justified the King’s choice of him as his Secretary of State. Southwell’s commission was to accompany the King on the journey to Carrickfergus on the eve of a vital royal campaign. In the event, the evidence is insufficient to establish whether or not Swift: took up the commission to work with Southwell in Ireland. Certainly, without the Temple-Southwell introduction Swift would not have been able to make the crossing to Ireland in the midst of the Jacobite uprising, nor remain in the troubled country for several months. But he did make the crossing, and he did remain in the country, which reinforces the supposition that he took up the commission.
King William III, by Godfrey Kneller, mezzotint by Andrew Miller, detail, left, and Sir Robert Southwell, by Kneller, mezzotint by J. Smith
Swift himself, writing in the third person in his ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, advances an unlikely explanation for the journey to Ireland: his illness from eating a surfeit of fruit. ‘Upon this Occasion he returned to Ireld, by advice of Physicians, who weakly imagined that his native air might be of some use to recover his Health. But growing worse, he soon went back to Sir Wm Temple; with whom growing into some confidence he was often trusted with matters of great Importance.’10 This account obfuscates, perhaps deliberately, the extraordinary circumstances of his presence in a country where a serious war was being waged, and explains nothing of the time spent there.11
Swift’s early years at Moor Park have been seen as apprentice years; the inference is that he climbed slowly to favour and importance in his patron’s eyes. Temple’s letter to Southwell, written just a year after Swift’s arrival at Moor Park, would suggest otherwise. What Temple is doing, in that letter, is consigning his young protégé to the King’s right-hand man at the outset of a great military campaign. The young man who is being offered by Temple ‘has Latin and Greek, some French, writes a very good and current hand, is very honest and diligent, and has good friends, though they have for the present lost their fortunes, and his whole family having been long known to me oblige me thus far to take care of him’.12 There is nothing restrained or doubting in Temple’s endorsement. Temple is not necessarily furthering Swift’s career only for Swift’s sake; it is tempting to speculate that Temple wanted to receive from Swift first-hand intelligence on the country in which he grew up and in which he still held property, and where other members of his family, including his brother, had even more extensive interests.
While in Ireland, Swift began his ‘Ode to the King on His Irish Expedition and the Success of His Arms in general’. Whether he finished it there, or later, at Moor Park, is not known, but the intense and passionate tone in which it is composed would suggest rapid composition, a view reinforced by the fact that his next work was ‘rough drawn in a week, and finished in two days after’.13 He was getting the hang of things, even if the pindaric form was shortly to be dropped in favour of couplets.14
We have no clear dates for Swift’s return from Ireland. He visited his mother in Leicester, and stayed with her long enough to engage in flirtation with a local girl, possibly more than one. It seems he also travelled by way of Oxford where he stayed for a short time, probably for the purpose of visiting his cousin Thomas Swift. Then he went on to Moor Park. He was to return to Oxford the following summer, when he obtained his master’s degree. He was soon to engage directly in writing his ‘Ode to the Athenian Society’, whose work was of some interest to Temple, and indeed to Swift. This Ode was also Swift’s first appearance in print. He sent it with a letter dated 14 February 1692 from Moor Park, and both were published in The Athenian Gazette that March. In the accompanying letter Swift refers to being in Ireland the previous year, ‘from whence I returned about half a year ago’, a half year during which time he read all the publications of the Society.
Both the poem and the letter express the writer’s admiration for the far-ranging inquiry that went on within the Society.15 The Ode is cast in enthusiastic terms, uses war metaphors which link it to the ‘Ode to the King’, and is momentarily quite witty. In a marginal note Swift refers directly to the preceding composition, ‘the Ode I writ to the King in Ireland’. The new poem is certainly more assured than the earlier Odes, and looks forward to the remaining poems in the early canon of Swift’s work—‘Ode to Dr William Sancroft’, ‘To Mr Congreve’, and ‘[Lines] Occasioned by Sir W— T—’s Late Illness and Recovery’.
On the evidence of his work, of his few letters dating from this time, and of Temple’s testimonial letter to Southwell, it is hard not to form the opinion that he viewed Moor Park as his home, that he came and went freely. He enjoyed the confidence and support of his patron, and spent a great deal of time writing: ‘I have writ, and burnt and writ again, upon almost all manner of subjects, more perhaps than any man in England’, he wrote to the Reverend John Kendall.16
While it is clear that the pindaric form in poetry is ill-suited to Swift’s mature voice, it did correspond with his youthful energy and his essentially passionate nature. He was precisely what Temple wanted at this time, a writer both gifted and spirited to help him during his closing years and to put his papers in order, with a view to further publication. Swift reinforced his capabilities, in Temple’s eyes, with a manner and form in his writing that was respectful to the point of being adulatory. Among Temple’s dearly loved children, all of whom at this stage had pre-deceased him, there was nothing comparable to the talent Swift displayed from his arrival at Moor Park. And whatever other reasons there may have been for the sustained association between the two men, Swift’s ability to write was a powerful cement in their developing relationship. Allowing for the forty years between them in age, their mutual dependence and their common love for language, debate and writing created what amounted to a real friendship.
At the request of the Bishop of Ely, Swift began an ‘Ode to Dr William Sancroft, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’ in May 1692, but he failed to finish it. Two further poems followed in 1693, one of them an attempt to renew contact with his friend of school and university days, William Congreve, whose successful early plays The Old Batchelor and The Double-Dealer inspired Swift. They made him envious as well, and the poem conveys complicated emotional contradictions. Congreve had behind him the powerful hand of Dryden, who helped to achieve the performance of his first play and saw in Congreve his heir in the field of drama. Swift envisaged that the lines might appear as a ‘Prologue’ for the printed version of The Double-Dealer, but before offering them he wrote to his cousin Thomas Swift (who had advised him to keep the poem to himself): ‘I desire you will send me word immediately how it [the play] succeeded, whether well, ill or indifferently, because my sending them to Mr Congreve depends upon knowing the issue.’17 Swift thought the verses would serve for any of his former schoolfriend’s plays.
William Congreve, by Godfrey Kneller, mezzotint by J. Smith
He wrote also at this time a second poem addressed to his patron. The dutiful ‘[Lines] Occasioned by Sir W— T—’s Late Illness and Recovery’ tells us little about the illness, and surprisingly little about Temple generally. But it is a confident expression of Swift’s poetic skill, of which this is the last surviving example until the mature voice emerges at the end of the decade, mainly in octosyllabic couplets.
That he had the fall confidence of Temple is demonstrated by his being sent to the Palace of Kensington to present to the King, and at much greater length to the King’s favourite, the Earl of Portland, Temple’s views on the Triennial Bill. This was a reenactment of Charles I’s Triennial Act, requiring a new House of Commons every three years. Swift delivered a document from Temple on which he gave a verbal gloss, speaking briefly to the King, and at length to Portland. Nearly four decades later Swift wrote sourly of this encounter with the Court: ‘This was the first time that Mr Swift had ever any converse with courts, and he told his friends it was the first incident that helped to cure him of vanity.’18 But his vanity at the time was of a different order; and William Temple’s sister, Lady Martha Giffard, in a letter to her niece, Lady Berkeley, wrote: ‘I have sent him with another compliment from Papa to the King, where I fancy he is not displeased with finding occasions of going.’19
Swift expected his career to be helped forward as a result of his services to Temple. He made his inclination to enter the Church, which he had formulated during his time at Moor Park, contingent on getting a preferment. It did not happen. Some kind of breach occurred between the two men in 1694, occasioned by Swift’s departure from Moor Park, Temple, understandably, not wishing him to go. Swift told his cousin Deane that Temple ‘was extremely angry I left him’; apparently his patron was reluctant to give Swift any clear assurances about what his employment or role in the household might be.20 The implication is that this related in some way to Temple’s papers, which clearly justified collecting and editing. In the absence of Swift, Temple employed as secretary Swift’s cousin, Thomas, whose shortcomings seem to have been a factor in the return of Swift and his reconciliation with Temple. In the period of disaffection Swift wrote a very humble letter seeking urgent endorsement from Temple in the form of a ‘certificate of my behaviour’ while at Moor Park.21 Temple readily endorsed his protégé for holy orders, and in due course the friendship between the two men was fully restored.
This episode is one of several which strengthen the view of Swift as a permanent resident at Moor Park and not just a secretary, arriving, serving for a time, and departing.22 His career as it developed, and his private ambitions, were no impediment to his continuing presence in the household.
He was ordained in Christ Church Cathedral, and at the instigation of an unknown person was given the parish of Kilroot, east of Carrickfergus. He hated it, stayed for a year, then returned to Moor Park. During his stay in Ireland he may have sketched out in greater detail A Tale of a Tub, his first important work, and one of his most enjoyable. His experiences in the countryside around Carrickfergus, an area dominated by Dissenters, is always credited with inspiring the work. Dating it is difficult. Traditionally, he created the original allegory while at Trinity College, and John Lyon, a prebendary of St Patrick’s and manager of Swift’s affairs in his later years, claims that people may have seen it there or in his parish at Kilroot. Perhaps it was shelved during the early years at Moor Park, on account of Temple’s lack of sympathy for the art of satire, and then, after Swift had been enriched by the period in Ireland, the Tale reached fruition during the last spell at Moor Park, though it was not to be published until 1704.23
The Kilroot sojourn did produce Swift’s only known proposal of marriage, to Jane Waring, whom he called ‘Varina’. Despite their high-flown rhetoric, his letters to her ring false, and there is something artificial in the conjunction of an offer of marriage with the information that he is being encouraged to return to Moor Park and take up once again his duties there.
In short, Madam, I am once more offered the advantage to have the same acquaintance with greatness that I formerly enjoyed, and with better prospect of interest. I here solemnly offer to forgo it all for your sake. I desire nothing of your fortune; you shall live where and with whom you please till my affairs are settled to your desire, and in the meantime I will push my advancement with all the eagerness and courage imaginable, and do not doubt to succeed.24
It is a long letter; and, oddly, it has all the appearances of being for public, or posterity’s, consumption. It concludes: ‘Farewell, Madam, and my love make you awhile forget your temper to do me justice. Only remember, that if you still refuse to be mine, you will quickly lose, for ever lose, him that is resolved to die as he has lived, all yours. Jon. Swift.’ She did refuse to become his wife, or to make any promise in that direction. And there the matter rested for some time.
The second literary work of importance belonging to this early period, in which Swift was finding the true expression of his nature in satire, was The Battle of the Books, a mock-treatise on the conflict between the Ancients and the Moderns. If A Tale of a Tub had greater contemporary impact, and was in absolute terms a more substantial work, The Battle of the Books is Swift’s humorous, satirical contribution to an endless human argument between the intellectual benefits and authority of the past and those of the present. Its immediate inspiration was not so much what Sir William Temple had said in his essay ‘Of Ancient and Modern Learning’ (1690), but the fact that Temple made a passing reference to The Epistles of Phalaris, which were subsequently shown to be fraudulent. The exposure fuelled an energetic controversy. The Battle of the Books was Swift’s comment on it.
The so-called ‘Battle’, between the authority of ancient learning and the challenge of modern thought, has been present in one form or another in every century. Great seventeenth-century minds—Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, and others—had brought the discussion to a head. The argument was conducted in every field of human inspiration and performance. Aeschylus holds his place against Racine; Plato and Aristotle are read and have a following for the eternal value of their thought. Temple’s invasion of this inexhaustible debating territory was modest, mannerly, well judged and philosophically correct. What he attacks is pedantry. His references to the Epistles are insignificant, and he was essentially right in claiming that excellence in thought or in artistic creation was a product of no system, but of the individual’s judgment and integrity.
There is no real argument, at least not with the benefit of hindsight. Swift’s own view is that advance in human thought, in creative work, is as inescapable as are the lasting achievements of the past. No authority can rest exclusively with the Ancients, nor with the Moderns. Swift’s only option, as a young witness to a grave debate, was to make a joke of it for posterity, rescuing his patron from his minor error regarding the Epistles, and punishing the ‘schoolmen’ for the uncompromising virulence of their assault. In this way he offers his own resolution to the conflict, though it was not published until 1704, well after the immediate row had died down.
Sir William Temple died in January 1699 when Swift was thirty-three and in the prime of his life. Their ten-year friendship had transformed that life; living and working with the retired statesman had given Swift self-confidence, a position in the world, and the guidance and example of a remarkable career. Temple’s decision to make Swift his literary executor meant that the younger man would redeploy the exemplary life in the publication of the Works. As Walter Scott says, since ‘all Swift’s plans revolve upon making himself eminent as an author, the value of such an occasion to distinguish himself could scarcely be too highly estimated’.25 Though Swift wished otherwise, this, in the end, was the route, and the only route, to the success he was to have in life. He was not rewarded or taken care of in terms of Church appointment, or even prospects in that direction. He was never to enjoy such privileges, and the rewards he had were always less than he felt he merited. But in the household of Sir William Temple during the 1690s he learned a trade, found his voice as a writer, and defined many of the attitudes which were to govern his future life.
Notes
5 ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, in Herbert Davis, ed., Jonathan Swift: Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces (Oxford, 1969), p. 193. For detailed consideration of the ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, see Denis Johnston, In Search of Swift (Dublin, 1959).
6 Sir William Temple to Sir Robert Southwell, 29 May 1690. Ball, I, p. 2.
7 Deane Swift, An Essay upon the Life, Writings, and Character, of Dr Jonathan Swift (London, 1775), p. 38.
8 For details on this and other poems, see Harold Williams, ed., The Poems of Jonathan Swift, second edition, 3 vols (Oxford, 1958). See also Homer E. Woodbridge, Sir William Temple (New York and London, 1940), particularly p. 219. The Ode was first published by Richard Dodsley in 1745, in the tenth volume of the Miscellanies. It has been in the Works ever since. Scholars have argued over the date and place of its composition. As poetry it has been treated dismissively, as juvenilia; as a biographical source it has been largely ignored.
9 Ball, I, p. 1, n. 4.
10 ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, p. 193.
11 In a correction to the Cobbe copy of the ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, recorded by Denis Johnston, Swift changes the date of his journey to Ireland, further frustrating those trying to sort out this difficult period. Johnston writes (p. 117): ‘The fact that he could not say simply that he was given a job with Southwell that came to nothing, must be bound up with some unpleasantness about the incident, that he does not wish to remember.’ This interpretation is open to question.
12 Temple to Southwell, 29 May 1690. Ball, I, p. 2.
13 Quoted in Williams, I, p. 14, from Ball, I, p. 363. The reference comes from a long letter of 1692 to his cousin Thomas Swift in which Swift gives details of his method of writing at the time.
14 Pindar, the Greek lyric poet (c. 522–442 BC), used many forms of verse, his Olympian odes being both formal and florid, with exaggerated expression, suited to the celebration of victories, either military or sporting. Abraham Cowley (1618–67), who was Swift’s more recent model, brought the loose prosodic structure to a high level of perfection. Swift never matches Cowley’s economy of thought and wit. Instead, he seems to romp, with all the enjoyment and enthusiasm of youth, within the frame which Cowley perfected.
15 Ehrenpreis is unnecessarily dismissive of the work of the Society, and sees ‘timidity and diffidence’ in Swift’s attitude: ‘Swift dared not follow his own literary schemes but looked to Temple and Lady Giffard for hints.’ There is no evidence for this. Both the letter and the Ode suggest the opposite. Ehrenpreis’s analysis of the Ode itself is valuable.
16 Swift to Kendall, 11 February 1692. Ball, I, p. 4. Kendall was vicar of Thornton, ten miles from Leicester. His wife was sister to Swift’s mother.
17 Swift to Thomas Swift, 6 December 1693. Ball, I, pp. 367–8.
18 ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, p. 194.
19 Martha Giffard to Lady Betty Berkeley, 30 December [?1697]. See Martha, Lady Giffard: Life & Letters 1664–1722, edited by Julia Longe (London, 1911), p. 216.
20 Quoted in Ehrenpreis, I, p. 148.
21 Quoted in Ehrenpreis, I, p. 152.
22 The view is endorsed by Homer Woodbridge, specifically in respect of the letter to Sir Robert Southwell. See Woodbridge, Sir William Temple, pp. 220, 333. In general, biographers ignore what they cannot explain, but several, from Henry Craik to Irvin Ehrenpreis, have inferred a transient status for Swift at Moor Park which the present writer finds difficult to accept.
23 See Ehrenpreis, I, pp. 186–7, for a more detailed analysis. There is, of course, a huge literature on this crucial work in Swift’s evolution as a writer.
24 Swift to Jane Waring, 29 April 1696. Ball, I, p. 18.
25 Sir Walter Scott, ed., Works of Jonathan Swift, I, p. 51.